A reverberation imparting device is generally understood as a sound processing unit processing input signals representing an acoustic sound in such a way that the processed input signals are modified into an artificially established signal having desired acoustic properties as if the input signals were present in a certain room such as concert halls or the like.
Due to the relatively substantial requirements to the necessary hardware, the above-described technical discipline has been developed only recently.
The greatly improved facilities and possibilities of the commercially available digital signal processing processors and the correspondingly improved supporting A/D and D/A converting hardware have nevertheless provided a significant push-forward, as relatively large data streams may be processed, thus still improving the possibility of emulating the physical reality to a higher degree.
Nevertheless, it is still a fact that a true emulation of even a simple room may be quite complicated, both when considering the establishing of the theoretically necessary basics and the necessary supporting hardware.
A problem with the conventional technique, especially at the recording stage, is that naturalness is harder to obtain when the emulated sound image consists of several sound sources located in a simulated room.
Typically, sound rendering of multiple sound sources are generated by room simulators having one or two inputs and the processed input sound from the different sound sources basically shares the same early reflection pattern.
Consequently, the different sound sources are piled on top of each other in the resulting created sound image. The quality of this sound piling is far from convincing and simple individual panning of each source will suffer from equal sound impression due to the shared early reflection pattern.
An additional problem will arise with multi-channel recordings as each source should be handled very carefully in order to achieve naturalness.
It is one object of the invention to provide a room simulation for multi-channel sound processing.